Economic downturns, endogenous Government Policy and Welfare Caseloads

Governments can soften the impact of the business cycle on welfare spending. Depending on the political costs and the extent of unemployment, they might choose between a decrease in the proportion of accepted applications, a decrease in the level of benefits, or some combination of the two. This paper is motivated by this concern, weaving together the intensive literature on the determinants of welfare caseloads and the fundamentals of public choice theory applied to the design of welfare programs. The paper is based on data from the minimum income program of Catalonia’s government (PIRMI). We use autoregressive distributed lag models to find that the generosity of the program is clearly predictive of the receipt of benefits even in contexts of high and growing unemployment rates. We also find a fairly strong correlation between unemployment growth and the proportion of rejected applications and a trade-off between the level of benefits and rejections.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Evaluating welfare reform under program heterogeneity and alternative measures of success

This paper aims at presenting an assessment of welfare reforms under a framework of program heterogeneity and alternative measures of success. We focus on a specific welfare program –Madrid’s Ingreso Madrileño de Integración (IMI)– which comprises heterogeneous subprograms. We test whether work-related subprograms perform better than general activities aimed at improving life skills. We also try to identify which work-related subprogram works best. The availability of a large database of administrative records (over 50,000 spells) matched with a special survey conducted for former welfare recipients makes possible to develop different types of evaluation strategies on the basis of multiple participation states. Our results show that intensive employment activities yield remarkably better results than general work-related schemes or life skills activities. However, increasing work participation does not automatically lift participants out of material hardship.welfare, poverty, program evaluation, multiple treatments.

Measuring Social Welfare Gains in Social Assistance Programs: An Application to European Countries

This paper aims to provide a framework for a complete assessment of the overall welfare gains resulting from social assistance programs. We make use of a social welfare function that satisfies several properties that must be considered when measuring the protection provided by these programs. We propose measuring the welfare gains that a society derives from these programs by summing up them in a way that is consistent with the standard value judgements in the income inequality literature. We also propose analytical tools that accumulate the welfare gains that, apart from having the advantage of being easy to interpret, allow the ranking of different scenarios and have an associated dominance criterion. To illustrate our approach, we measure the welfare gains caused by social assistance schemes in European countries.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Cross-Country Income Mobility Comparisons Under Panel Attrition: The Relevance of Weighting Schemes

This paper aims to present an assessment of the effects of panel attrition on income mobility comparisons for some EU-countries by using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). There are different possibilities of correcting the attrition problem by means of alternative longitudinal weighting schemes. The sensitivity of mobility estimates to these attrition correction procedures is tested in the paper. Our results show that ECHP attrition is characterised by a certain degree of selectivity but only affecting some variables and countries. Different probability models corroborate the existence of a certain non-random attrition. The model chosen to construct the longitudinal weights to correct attrition offers up rather different results than those obtained when Eurostat’s longitudinal weights are used. Although attrition does not seem to have a great effect on aggregated mobility indicators, it does have a decisive effect on decomposition exercises. Finally, the tests conducted on income mobility indicators reveal a certain sensitivity to the weighting system used.Income mobility, attrition, European Community Household Panel.

Poverty and the business cycle: The role of the intra-household distribution of unemployment

Conventional wisdom predicts that changes in the aggregate unemployment rate may significantly affect a country’s income distribution and, as a consequence, have a relevant impact on the evolution of the poverty rate. However, the relationship between labour macroeconomic indicators and poverty seems to have become weaker in recent times. Using panel data on unemployment and poverty for Spanish regions we estimate a System GMM model in order to model this relationship taking into account that the intrahousehold distribution of unemployment can be more relevant than aggregate unemployment in order to explain poverty changes. We also test the hypothesis of asymmetric effects of the business cycle on the share of poor individuals in the population. Our results show that unemployment has a positive impact on severe poverty, while inflation has a negative effect. Among the three unemployment measures considered in order to predict poverty, the percentage of households where all active members are unemployed registers the highest explanatory power. We also find that a change in unemployment has a larger effect on poverty during a period of economic recession than during a period of expansion.poverty forecasting, unemployment, system GMM model

Collisional parton energy loss in a finite size QCD medium revisited: Off mass-shell effects

We study the collisional energy loss mechanism for particles produced off mass-shell in a finite size QCD medium. The off mass-shell effects introduced are to consider particles produced in wave packets instead of plane waves and the length scale associated to an in-medium particles' life-time. We show that these effects reduce the energy loss as compared to the case when the particles are described as freely propagating from the source. The reduction of the energy loss is stronger as this scale becomes of the order or smaller than the medium size. We discuss possible consequences of the result on the description of the energy loss process in the parton recombination scenario.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Enlarged discussion. References added. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

La descentralización territorial de los sistemas de garantía de rentas

This paper considers to what extent the Spanish model of means-tested benefits causes regional inequalities in the coverage of low-income households. The Spanish model is often assumed to be a normal experience among the European Welfare States. This fact is put into question reviewing different schemes of decentralisation. Different empirical exercises are put into action to evaluate both the inequality effects of centralised benefits (non-contributory pensions) as well as those inequalities intrinsically linked to completely decentralised anti-poverty programs (regional minimum income programs). The empirical results show substantial inequalities raised by both institutional designs. It is necessary the search for a new model reducing the extreme design of the present systems.En este trabajo se analiza en qué medida el modelo español de protección asistencial puede generar desigualdades interterritoriales relevantes en la cobertura de las situaciones de insuficiencia de ingresos. Para ello se analiza la singularidad de la experiencia española en el contexto de la Unión Europea y se evalúa, desde el plano empírico, tanto el efecto sobre la igualdad implícito en el desarrollo de las prestaciones asistenciales centralizadas (pensiones no contributivas) como las desigualdades que puede generar un sistema descentralizado de lucha contra la pobreza (rentas mínimas autonómicas). El análisis de los datos revela que ambos tipos de diseño generan importantes desigualdades, aconsejando la búsqueda de un nuevo modelo que modere el carácter extremo de los dos esquemas

Measuring inequality and dependences between income sources with administrative data and survey data

Producción CientíficaThis paper aims at analyzing the effects of changing from survey to administrative data on inequality and its structure. Taking advantage of the Spanish Survey on Income and Living Conditions (ECV) that continued asking households for their income despite assigning them the income data provided by the Tax Agency and the Social Security administration, different analyses are carried out. By using copula functions we pay special attention to the effect on the dependences between income sources. We find a significant growth in the disposable income of households when using administrative data. The incomes of both tails of the distribution increase considerably more than middle incomes, and administrative data produce significantly lower levels of inequality. Using administrative instead of survey data also gives rise to changes in the structure of inequality by income sources, rising the contribution of capital income. Both methods of data collection also produce significant differences in the observed dependences between income sources.Economía Aplicad